On Sunday, eastern Germany becomes a mirror held up to the nation's democratic soul, as voters decide whether the Alternative for Germany's years of patient cultivation in the former East have produced roots deep enough to endure, or whether a gathering civic resistance can still redirect the current. The AfD's rise has been fed by real grievances — economic stagnation, cultural anxiety, a feeling of abandonment — and the established parties must now reckon with whether they have answered those grievances or merely hoped they would dissolve. What is decided in these regional polling stations w